The Serial Killers Read online

  Meanwhile, Tsuneo Mori had confessed to the police that his group had murdered twelve of their own members during the time they had been in hiding on Mount Kasho. Following his instructions, police unearthed three decomposing corpses in a cedar forest – one man and two women, one of whom was eight months pregnant. Medical examination revealed that the cause of death was freezing in sub-zero temperatures; all three had been bound and left in the open to die. The women proved to be members of another radical organisation which had merged with the Red Army Faction – the Chukyo Anti-Japan-US Security Pact. Nine more bodies were eventually discovered, bringing the total to three women and nine men. Police searching for the corpses in the mountains admitted that their efficiency had been improved during the previous year when they had searched for the eight victims of a sex maniac called Kiyoshi Okubo in the same area; they had learned to tell a grave by the colour of the earth.

  What gradually emerged was that Tsuneo Mori was not the one who was mainly responsible for the murders. The person who had inspired them had been Hiroko Nagata. Mori was a weak character, who felt that he had to maintain his leadership through harshness; he spent much of the interrogation in tears. Hiroko Nagata, a pharmaceutical graduate, was altogether stronger. But her inferiority complex about her unattractive appearance had turned to murderous paranoia in the freezing winter hideout where the thirty Red Army members hid for three months. (They frequently made long treks in the moonlight, staggering with exhaustion, to other empty cabins; Mori urged them on by reminding them that Mao Tse Tung had suffered worse things during the Long March.) A woman member who escaped told of candlelight discussions of points of Marxist doctrine, ending with demands for ruthless ‘self-criticism’. All this led to harsh punishments, and to a series of ‘loyalty purges’ rather like the Stalin purges of the thirties. One twenty-two-year-old youth – the founder of the Chukyo group – was beaten, then stabbed to death by his two younger brothers, who were ordered to carry out the murder to prove their loyalty. A woman who escaped – leaving her three-month-old baby behind – had watched her husband stabbed to death but had not dared to protest in case she was killed too. It had been Hiroko Nagata who had led the discussions, often losing her temper and becoming hysterical. She liked to tell other members of the group that they were too materialistic. It was Nagata, too, who had ordered that the hair of the three dead women should be cropped close to the skull as a punishment; one of them had been tied up naked and confined in a narrow space below the floor, another tied to a pillar for several days until she died. Her crime was wearing earrings.

  In prison and under interrogation, Hiroko Nagata at first remained arrogant, ordering the investigators around, demanding coffee, turning her back on them. But as police pointed out the various mistakes that had led to her arrest, she suddenly admitted: ‘We’ve been licked’; thereafter she began combing her hair, which until then she had kept in a ‘revolutionary’ state of untidiness.

  In January 1973, Tsuneo Mori hanged himself in prison. Hiroko Nagata was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  In retrospect, the most incomprehensible thing about the murders is that the other members of the group permitted them. This may be due partly to the natural obedience to authority that characterises the Japanese (one of the survivors described how all used to listen, with averted eyes, as Mori and Nagata harangued them). But it also seems clear that the group were totally dominated by their leaders, just as the Manson family was dominated by its father figure, and Myra Hindley by Ian Brady. In effect, they were brainwashed – and this again seems to be a phenomenon that is often associated with revolutionary movements. When heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped at gunpoint by a group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army on 5 February 1974, it was as a ‘capitalist’ hostage; the ‘Army’s’ motto was ‘Death to the Fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people’. After her father had distributed two million dollars’ worth of food to the poor – on the orders of the ‘Army’ – Patty Hearst sent her parents a tape stating that she had been converted to the revolutionary ideology, and denouncing the food distribution as a sham; shortly afterwards she took part in the armed robbery of a bank. In May, the ‘Army’s’ Los Angeles hideout was surrounded by police; in the battle and the fire that followed, the leaders of the movement were killed. Yet Patty Hearst continued ‘on the run’ with the remaining members of the gang until her arrest in September 1975. Her trial led to a sentence of seven years’ imprisonment but she was released on probation after eight months and quickly returned to the non-revolutionary views of her early days.

  In the Red Army Faction case, perhaps the most striking thing is the degeneration of Tsuneo Mori and Hiroko Nagata as they realised that they possessed absolute power over their followers. For Hiroko Nagata at any rate, murder became a pleasure. This is again something that can be observed in the majority of serial killers. Killing and inflicting torture become an addiction. Yet perhaps this is hardly surprising when we consider that de Sade’s attitude towards society is also ‘revolutionary’, and that there is a definite link between his political views and his ‘sadism’. He takes it for granted that all authority is unutterably corrupt, and bases his philosophy of murder and torture on this completely negative attitude. Since the masters are vile, and the slaves little better than maggots, both deserve utter contempt. In Nagata and Mori, the same attitude led to torture and executions. In other Marxist revolutionary groups it has often led to a kind of ruthlessness that springs out of paranoia – as when, on 21 June 1977, Italian ‘Red Army’ terrorists burst into the room where Remo Cacciafesta, dean of Rome University’s School of Economics, was lecturing, and shot him in the legs, shouting that he was teaching his students to adapt to a fundamentally immoral society. The common denominator of political revolutionaries and serial killers is resentment and ‘magical thinking’.

  What is responsible for this increase in ‘magical thinking’ that has led to the increase in serial murder and political violence? In 1935, the philosopher Edmund Husserl suggested a link between political brutality – of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini – and the gradual decay of faith in rational certainty that had occurred over the past two centuries. His argument was less far-fetched than it sounds. For practical purposes, the philosophy of revolution can be traced back to 1762, the year Rousseau’s Social Contract appeared, with its famous opening sentence: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’ The corollary was that he is not free because various wicked authorities have entered into a conspiracy to deprive him of his freedom. Rousseau was weak and neurotic, and he urgently wanted to find somewhere to lay the blame for his own unhappiness. So he created the myth that there was once a golden age when all men lived together in perfect harmony, and that this came to an end because a few evil men seized power and enslaved the rest. It followed, of course, that the answer to the problem was for the oppressed to strike off their chains and overthrow the oppressors. His philosophy, as developed by Marx, has eventually come to dominate half the globe, until it is a part of the air we breathe. We take it for granted that all right-thinking young people hold strong views about social justice, and to regard ‘protest’ with favour and authority with disfavour. We even take it for granted that most people hate the police. The tendency to ‘look for somewhere to lay the blame’ has become a part of our intellecutal inheritance, and it is impossible to understand the psychology of the serial killer without taking it into account.

  In practice, the kind of violence typified by the Red Army Faction – and the kind of irrationality that seemed to lie behind it – produced a powerful backlash. There was a general feeling that people who are willing to commit murder for their political ideology are dangerous cranks who have no place in a civilised society. Groups like the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Symbionese Liberation Army were hunted down with the full approval of the public. The suicides of Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader in 1977 seemed to symbolise the end of an
epoch. By the mid-1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika had made the politics of violent revolution seem oddly irrelevant. Yet it was at about this point, when a new age of reason seemed to have dawned in politics, that the general public became aware of the emergence of the serial killer.

  In England, it was the case of the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ that brought a general awareness of the problems of tracking down a random killer. It was appropriate that the press should have labelled him the Yorkshire Ripper, for he was the most notorious serial killer in Great Britain since the days of Jack the Ripper. The first three attacks occurred in the second half of 1975. Two women were knocked unconscious by hammer blows dealt from behind; in the first case, the attacker had raised her dress and was about to plunge the knife into her stomach when he was interrupted and ran away; in the second, he made slashes on the woman’s buttocks with a hacksaw blade. The third victim, a prostitute, was knocked unconscious with the hammer, then stabbed to death. She was the first of thirteen murder victims over the course of the next five years. Some were prostitutes; some were simply women or girls who happened to be out walking in the dark. In most cases, the victim was stabbed and slashed repeatedly in the area of the stomach and vagina, although the killer stopped short of actual disembowelment.

  By early 1978, the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper had become the biggest police operation ever mounted in Britain. Yet the problem facing the police – as in all such cases – was the sheer number of suspects. In the early years of the twentieth century the great criminologist Edmond Locard had stated the basic tenet of forensic detection: ‘Every contact leaves a trace’; but in the case of a random killer, the ‘traces’ left behind are useless, since they afford no clue to his identity. The police had to hunt the Yorkshire Ripper with the ‘needle-in-the-haystack’ method – checking thousands of remote possibilities. In this case, the numberplates of all cars seen regularly in red-light districts were noted, and the drivers interviewed. When one murdered prostitute was found to be in possession of a new £5 note, the police traced the batch of notes from the bank to twenty-three factories in Bradford, whose employees they interviewed. These included T. & W.H. Clark (Holdings) Ltd, an engineering transport firm, and among those they interviewed was a bearded, powerfully-built young man named Peter Sutcliffe; but they were satisfied with his alibi. In the following year Sutcliffe was again questioned because his car had been seen seven times in a red-light district, but he was believed when he said that he had to drive through it on his way to work. The car registration numbers had been fed into the police computer at Hendon; but the names of suspects interviewed were not fed into a computer. So the constable who talked to Sutcliffe about his car numberplate had no idea that he had also been interviewed in connection with the £5 note. It had been noted in reports at the Leeds police headquarters, but a huge backlog meant that these had not yet been processed – after all, 150,000 people had been interviewed and 27,000 houses searched. So Peter Sutcliffe was enabled to go on killing for two more years. When further investigation of the £5 note reduced the number of firms who might have received it from twenty-three to three, Sutcliffe was questioned yet again, and his workmates began jokingly to call him Jack the Ripper. In fact, when Sutcliffe was interviewed this time, he was wearing the boots he had worn when murdering his tenth victim, a nineteen-year-old clerk named Josephine Whitaker; the police had taken a mould of the imprint, but the police who questioned him did not think to look at his feet.

  After the thirteenth murder – of a student named Jacqueline Hill – the police decided to set up an advisory team of experts to study the murders all over again. These went to examine all the murder sites and used a computer to estimate their ‘centre of gravity’. This led then to the conclusion that the killer lived in Bradford rather than Leeds, where many of the murders had taken place. The next obvious step was to interview again every suspect who lived in Bradford – especially those who had already been interviewed in connection with the £5 note. Since the clues now included three sets of tyre tracks and three sets of footprints, it seems certain that this latest investigation would have identified Peter Sutcliffe as the Yorkshire Ripper. In fact, he was caught before that could happen. On 2 January 1981 two policemen on a routine patrol of the red-light district of Sheffield stopped their car to question a couple in a parked Rover. The man identified himself as Peter Williams; a check on the car with the police computer at Hendon revealed that it had a false numberplate. Taken in for questioning, Sutcliffe soon admitted his identity. In the Ripper Incident Room at Leeds, it was noted that the size of his shoes corresponded to the imprints found by three bodies. The constable who had arrested him recalled that he had requested permission to urinate before accompanying the police. His colleague, Sergeant Robert Ring, returned to the spot – an oil storage tank – and found a knife and a hammer. Faced with this evidence, Peter Sutcliffe finally confessed to being the Yorkshire Ripper. The initial motive of the attacks had been a brooding resentment about a prostitute who had cheated him of £10, which had become (in the illogical manner of serial killers) a desire to punish all prostitutes. After a while, violence had become an addiction, and he attacked any woman he saw walking alone after dark. In May 1981 he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and subsequently removed to Broadmoor, a secure hospital for the criminally insane.

  The Yorkshire Ripper case taught the police an important lesson. If suspects, like car number plates, had been fed into a computer, Sutcliffe would probably have been taken in for questioning in 1978 – when he was wearing the boots whose imprint was found beside Josephine Whitaker – and three lives would have been saved. A computer would have had no problem storing 150,000 suspects and 22,000 statements.

  Yet even with the aid of a computer, the task of tracking down a random serial killer like Sutcliffe would have been enormous. It could only display such details as the methods of known sex offenders, and the names of suspects who had been interviewed more than once. In their next major investigation of a serial killer, the Surrey police began with a list of 4,900 sex offenders – which, as it happened, contained the name of the man they were seeking. The ‘Railway Rapist’ began to operate in 1982; at this stage two men were involved in sexual attacks on five women on or near railway stations. By 1984 one of the men had begun to operate alone. He threatened his victims with a knife, tied their hands, and raped them with a great deal of violence. Twenty-seven such attacks occurred in 1984 and 1985. In January 1986, the body of nineteen-year-old Alison Day was found in the River Lea; she had vanished seventeen days earlier on her way to meet her boyfriend. She had been raped and strangled. In April 1986, fifteen-year-old Maartje Tamboezer, daughter of a Dutch oil executive, was accosted as she took a short cut through woods near Horsley, and dragged off the footpath; she was also raped and strangled. Her attacker was evidently aware of the most recent advance in forensic detection, ‘genetic fingerprinting’, by which a suspect can be identified from the distinctive pattern in the DNA of his body cells. The killer had stuffed a burning paper handkerchief into her vagina. A man who had been seen running for a train soon after the murder was believed to be the rapist, and two million train tickets were examined in an attempt to find one with his fingerprints.

  A month later, a twenty-nine-year-old secretary named Anne Lock disappeared on her way home from work; her body was found ten weeks later. Again, an attempt had been made to destroy sperm traces by burning.

  It was at this point that the police forces involved in the investigation decided to link computers; the result was the list of 4,900 sex offenders, soon reduced to 1,999. At number 1,594 was a man called John Duffy, charged with raping his ex-wife and attacking her lover with a knife. The computers showed that he had also been arrested on suspicion of loitering near a railway station. (Since the blood group of the Anne Lock strangler had been the same as that of the ‘Railway Rapist’, police had been keeping a watch on railway stations.) Duffy was called in for questioning, and his
similarity to the ‘Railway Rapist’ noted. (Duffy was small, ginger-haired and pockmarked.) When the police tried to conduct a second interview, Duffy was in hospital suffering from amnesia, alleging that he had been beaten up by muggers. The hospital authorities declined to allow him to be interviewed. Since he was only one of two thousand suspects, the police did not persist.

  At this point, the investigation team decided that an ‘expert’ might be able to help. They asked Dr David Canter, a professor of psychology at the University of Surrey, to review all the evidence. Using techniques similar to those used by the Yorkshire Ripper team – studying the locations of the attacks – he concluded that the ‘centre of gravity’ lay in the North London area, and that the rapist probably lived within three miles of Finchley Road. He also concluded that he had been a semi-skilled worker, and that his relationship with his wife had been a stormy one. When Canter’s analysis was matched up against the remaining suspects, the computer immediately threw up the name of John Duffy, who lived in Kilburn. Police kept him under surveillance until they decided that they could no longer take the risk of leaving him at liberty – another schoolgirl had been raped with typical violence since Duffy was committed to hospital – and arrested him. When a fellow martial arts enthusiast admitted that Duffy had persuaded him to beat him up so he could claim loss of memory, the police were certain that he was the man they were seeking. Five of rape victims picked him out at an identity parade, and string found in the home of his parents proved to be identical with that which had been used to tie Maartje Tamboezer’s wrists. When forensic scientists matched fibres from Alison Day’s sheepskin coat to fibres found on one of Duffy’s sweaters, the final link in the chain of evidence was established; although he continued to refuse to admit or deny his guilt, John Duffy was sentenced to life imprisonment.